Sue Sylvester’s Track Suits:

• Black with lovely white accents
• Dark blue with yellow stripes
• Black with red stripes
• Bright red with white stripe

Sue Sylvester’s Best Line:

“It’s like looking at a porno star in a nun’s habit.”

It’s yearbook time at McKinley High.  Oh, how happy we are that we have moved on from high school and are no longer forced to pose for, then buy, a $50+ hardcover book full of photos of people we no longer remember, or want to remember (read: Please Stop Facebooking Me, Ex-High School, College, and Law School Mates.  We Lost Touch for a Reason).

To start off this recap, we’re going to ask you to imagine this: Angelina Jolie’s doctor has an unsteady hand and screws up as he injects Botox around her eyes.  Now imagine that she doesn’t get any sleep because the Vietnamese baby she rescued from the Communist rice paddies was whining all night about how much he missed fish sauce.  Is this image in your head?  This is how Sue Sylvester looks when we see her – and it is awesome.  Emma, who just finished telling Schuester that she can’t attend his all-important Sectionals because she will be busy attending her wedding, sees Sue.  “Oh, Sue, did someone finally punch you?”  Oh, we love our girls sassy.

Sue explains to “Edie” that she just got her annual eye lift for the yearbook photo.  Oh, Cher, we’ve come a long way since bandages on the nose haven’t we?  And while she got the lift, she also got her eye ducts pulled.  Why?  Simple: she “wasn’t using them.”  We tend to agree with Sue about most things, but not so much on this one.  One really should not remove tear ducts for the same reason why you shouldn’t remove that tiny screw in the back of your TV: it serves some function, even if you don’t know what or why.

Sue then tells Schuester that she did the Gleeks a favor by pulling their yearbook photo away from them.  This will save them from the humilation of having their photos defaced and vandalized in the official school copies of the yearbook.  After a bitter protest by Schuester and Emma/Edie/Eleanor, Sue leaves the table – “You three are boring me now.  I’m going to do something else.”  Heh.

The Glee clubbers are relieved by Sue’s gesture.  Kurt notes the fate of other defaced Glee clubbers: homelessness, suicide. Although, wasn’t that their fate regardless of the Glee Club yearbook photo?  And, won’t their individual photos be defaced anyway, since everyone knows who is in Glee Club?  And why don’t the Gleeks just deface their tormentors’ photos?  Questions, questions.

The principal of McKinley doesn’t bother with logic; rather, he agrees with Sue: “I’m doing the Glee Club a solid!”  We think that one of the writers heard a good looking kid say this phrase, then thought that all cool kids say it, and that is how this horrible circa 2000s phrase entered this show.  We hope that same writer overhears the kid say, “Dude, remember that time when we were saying, ‘I’m doing you a solid’ all the time?  And how dumb that sounded?  So glad we don’t say crap like that anymore.”  We can only hope.

Schuester, on the other hand, believes that, similar to way gay marriages historically have not been counted in the United States census, “not being in the yearbook gives the appearance that Glee Club isn’t all that important.”  Rachel throws it out there that her two gay dads have close ties to the ACLU.  We’re not sure exactly what the ACLU could do in this situation, as being a Glee Club member does not mean you’re in a class that can be constitutionally protected from discrimination.  It’s sad, but true.  The principal states that the only way the Glee Club can get into the yearbook now is by buying an ad, at the very Super Bowl ad rate of $325 for a 1/4 page.  One quarter of a page means only two Gleeks get their mugs shot.  Schuester agrees to shell out.  Everyone seems to be ok with this … well, everyone, that is, except for Terri, who is not happy that Schuester is using part of his public teacher salary to buy an ad for some kids he doesn’t even own.  Meanwhile, we are really, really confused.  Do the other clubs have to pay ad space rates for their photos too?

No answers here, as the show is more concerned with which two will be the faces of Glee.  Rachel is the obvious choice; she wants to be the face of every club on campus so, when she’s applying for college, she will have evidence that she is totally involved in a school whose students generally terrorize her.  Schuester asks her to recruit a co-leader, and Rachel agrees in part because she has “65 proposals” to implement.  What, are we watching Marie Claire all of a sudden?

Witness the leadership buck being passed: first, Mercedes refuses, citing Kwanzaa prep.  Next, Artie is a no go because, apparently, the composition of the photo will be thrown off if he’s sitting in his wheelchair while she stands.  This reminds us of something we learned from Kristina Wong at last night’s Diane Meyer exhibit about being car-less in LA: even though the car-less generally would not like to be discriminated against by the car-ed, it is an awfully convenient crutch to get out of doing things people ask you to do.  Brittany’s the only one who honestly states that she can’t be in the photo because she doesn’t want to deface herself.

Rachel finally convinces Finn to be co-leader.  She schedules a lesson with him on Smiling 101 and assigns, um, Lily Allen’s Smile?  How will singing about a future ex-girlfriend’s delight in his misery help him smile?  Glee, you guys know what this song is about, right?  Instead of this useless exercise, Rachel needs to give him real pointers, like Mr. Jay does.  For example, Finn, you look goofy when you smile too big and show too much teeth, so be aware of both.  Practice in the mirror.  Don’t slouch, because you need to show off your football-y broad shoulders.  We need fierce, not dunce.  Also, as much as we give props to these kids’ amazing voices, this cover of “Smile” is probably the worst cover we’ve heard, particularly in light of this song’s approximately one million trillion covers, mixes, and mash-ups.  Listen to Ms. Allen doing it right with nothing other than an guitar:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And, because there was an enormous period of our lives when everything Lily Allen made sense to us, here is another Lily Allen video for your viewing pleasure.  Flutter.

When it counts, Finn flakes.  He’s a no show at the shoot.  Sigh, there are so many this world.  Rachel, understandably, is sorely disappointed, and needs a Twix moment.  She tells herself that she needs to “stop being defined by people who disappoint you.”  There are moments of bad writing on this show, and there are golden good ones, like that.  We need to take that advice.  She then shows fierce for the camera and convinces the photographer to cast the Glee Club in his commercial for a mattress store.   She theorizes that this will be great for the Glee Clubbers, because “no one messes with celebrities or defaces their pictures.”  Oh honey.  So much to learn.

The mattress company is very excited about the Gleeks, so excited that they apparently do not: 1) verify with McKinley that this last-minute casting is permitted; 2) determine whether it is actually legal to make a business deal with high school students; 2a) discuss waiver form issues with McKinley, so they know who would be liable for what should something go wrong; and 3) raise the fact that the Glee Clubbers, sans teacher supervisor, is a little odd.  Yes, so excited.  The mattress shoot itself involves a lot of mattress jumping and a rendition of Van Halen’s “Jump.”  It’s kind of cool, but, really, it just reminded us of how absolutely effing amazing OK GO’s “Here It Goes Again” music video was.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sue sees the commercial after finishing a “Sue’s Corner” segment.

All I want is one day out of the year where I am not visually assaulted by uglies and fatties. … Friday after Christmas, which I have off, if you’re hideous, stay at home.  Spend the entire day watching home videos of a time when you weren’t too repulsive for me to look at.

And that’s how Sue C’s it.  Yeah!  On her way out, she tells Andrea the Anchor: “That Sue’s Corner I just did?  I was talking about you.”  HA!

Schuester, meanwhile, does not see the commercial, because he is super busy at home discovering that his wife has been faking the pregnancy this entire time.  The cat’s finally out of the bag, ladies, gents, and all in between and beyond.  Now, there are all sorts of people who are crying “Emmy, Emmy!” for Matthew Morrison’s pretty great performance in this scene, the way the audience at Carnegie Hall demanded, “Encore! Encore!” when Judy Garland left the stage.  Don’t fret, Matthew Morrison lovers: it took Gillian Anderson too long to get her Emmy for The X-Files, and, in what might be the biggest robbery since the Academy foolishly voted for Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich over Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream in the Best Actress category, Battlestar Galactica was never, ever recognized by The Powers That Be.  Given the enormous build up and the amount of time devoted to this dumb plot line, the climax here was a bit disappointing: it felt a bit rushed.  We can’t put our finger on it, but there was some oomph lacking.  Just to contrast, this scene between Roseanne and Dan left us feeling chilled, like we watched the last fight between our parents before they decide to Divorce.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In an interview with the LA Times, the actress who plays Terri hopes that this fight gives us positive insight and/or pity for her character.  Unfortunately, it really didn’t, although we – like Emma at the end of the episode – acknowledge that people do stupid things for desperate reasons.  For example, relentlessly overusing auto-tune during music numbers.

Schuester seeks refuge in his office.  This says a lot about his social life, and also this writer’s, since that is where I used to go too.  He grabs one of the mattresses given to Gleeks for their commercial work and sleeps/soils on it.  Problem is, as Sue points out, accepting any payment negates Glee Club’s amateur status, which disqualifies them from the amateurs-only Sectionals.  Schuester points out that this whole ordeal was just an “innocent mistake”; Sue shoots right back at him: “What if I were to ‘innocently’ murder you, Will?  I’d still have to go to trial.”  Oh, snap.  What did we say about sassy girls?

The principal correctly notes that the mistake doesn’t matter (it’s true; outside of a self-defense situation, you’d get second-degree or manslaughter even if the killing was innocent) and, further, they can’t return all of the mattresses to rectify the situation because it was used.  (This also is so, so true – we have tried oh so hard to give away our used mattresses, but no one wants them.  We’re clean, honest.).  Schuester gets DQ’ed.  This leads to an awesome Sue Sylvester Dear Journal moment:

Quinn comes in to Sue’s office spoil the victor.  She calls Sue on being a hypocrite – turns out Sue always has gotten the Cheerios free swag, from shoes to hair treatments.  Quinn successfully blackmails Sue into giving up a page from the Cheerio’s six page spread to Glee, for free.  She severs all ties with Cheerios on her way out by inverting a lesson from Marx (Groucho, not Karl – what do you think you’re reading?):  “I don’t want to be on a team where I only appear to belong. I’d rather be part of a club that’s proud to have me – Glee Club.”

The episode ends with Emma somewhat suggesting that Will not leave his wife, and the footballers defacing Glee’s yearbook page.  Is it the end of the year already?